110184-time-to-reduce-box-price
Content ---- ---- ---- Would love to know where you get your "statistics" from. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Do you want statistics? All servers are always low at any time of the day. From my first Guild on Zhur (60+ ppl) all except me and a few others quit. I moved to Hazzak while it was still high/med and joined a large Guild ~200 ppl and a very active Circle ~100 ppl ( and a few other minor circles). Now even Hazzak, the most populated server in EU, is always low. My guild has maximum 10 ppl online and my circle 10-15 max. Out of ~20 real id friends of mine, only 2 have left logging every day. The rest either quit or have more than 3+ weeks to enter the game. So who needs statistics? I love this game and i log in every day. I m writing in many gaming forums since a long time ago to support and promote it. I m every day in these forums asking for solutions, future plans and fixes. It would be very easy for me to just leave and join my 90% of friends / guild m8's who are already preparing for WoD, but i will not. I prefer to stay here and fight for WS, but results wont come if we are hiding our heads in the sand. Most ppl left and many are leaving every day. THAT'S A FACT. Just face it and don't ask for pointless statistics. | |} ---- ---- Sounds like it's more of an EU problem more so than a NA Problem (Not that NA doesn't have it's share of low pops but we have more mediums than you guys do), most of my account friends log in daily I have 3 out of 20 that haven't been on in over a month and I know them RL and I know the reasons why, and it's not game related. My server Evindra does pretty okay with pop our Dommy side needs more love but it's still not bad my Guild also has happy active talking people on at almost all hours. So our experiences are completely different. (I am of course on NA not EU) that said, my Idea would do far more good than yours would, but they need to polish those fixes first. In the mean time you can either wait it out or go do something else and come back when things are fixed. making thread after thread after thread, is going to accomplish nothing, Every possible fix to the games pop is going to require time, whether it's drawing players back, merging servers etc. So just chill a bit, they are aware of what's going on and I'm sure they are working on Plans to try to fix this with merges as a last resort. | |} ---- I'm not sure what people stopping their subs has to do with the box price. They already paid for it. If they come back, they don't have to pay for it again. Carbine's first order of business should be addressing player concerns. | |} ---- I m not saying ppl are stopping their subs because of this. I say that lowering the box price would attract more ppl into the game. FFX did that and already experiencing a huge raise in sales for many months in the row. Not that this is the main reason, but it helps a lot. | |} ---- You're right you aren't saying that. You are telling Carbine & NCSoft how to run their game / business with 0 understanding of the REAL state of their product. | |} ---- That gets into everyone else's good point, that if they're going to go on a new member blitz, they'd better fix the stuff everyone's complaining about first. It's no secret that most of the people left not because of gameplay, but a few ancillary systems and exploits. For instance, PVP was almost ruined by their reward system and people tanking their rating once they had 1800 gear to get around being paired against their competition (and to make money). The RNG on stats as well as drops made most people feel mid-range endgame PVE was going to be a long, slow slog through attunement and, with only raiding left, people are waiting for more small-group endgame. Recently, Carbine pushed back their next content drop to do a major unified systems/bug improvement. If that proves popular, I can see them introducing a sale and/or huge marketing blitz. Until then, it may be tilting at windmills. | |} ---- ---- In EU there isnt even a single medium server even in prime time. Btw you are right. Its better to play something else until things are fixed. | |} ---- ---- The sooner you apologists and we critics stop attacking each other and try to pass the blame the sooner Carbine may find a middle ground to answer real concerns and find an appropriate direction to take towards some solutions or stand their ground. | |} ---- I would definitely not characterize it that way, and I pay a sub and never buy CREDD. But, essentially, what Carbine gets from sub holders is 15$ a month. What they get from CREDD buyers is 20$ a month upfront. RNG grind taken into account (because it is what it is), I don't think the game was designed to have "F2P tedium", or they'd have given us exactly what you're asking for, a way for a sub to make them more money. However, at present, they make a LOT more money from CREDD, not just because it costs more, but because even if someone doesn't buy it and use it from the CX, they've still made their money. | |} ---- ---- It also seems more like misguided design than greed to me. Before you refute me with cynicism, consider the following: On many low pop servers, there literally aren't enough CX materials and gear available that you can "pay2win" your way to with CREDD, nor probably even enough people to provide you with the necessary platinum. It's simply not a sustainable model to "rip people off" until they leave or pay up. If they truly wanted to do that, good gear, runes, etc. would all come from platinum vendors without any rep or achievement requirements. You could just sell the CREDD and stock up on everything you need. Since that couldn't be further from the truth, I will continue to disagree with "this game was designed to sell you more CREDD". The only potentially "forced tedium" to make people buy CREDD is vanity items (which I don't consider a valid argument because... you don't need them) and buying dungeon/PvP boosts (ditto for obvious reasons). Does the game have more than a few overblown goldsinks? Yeah, sure. I'll give you that. But it still seems to be they're put their to battle inflation, not rip customers off. | |} ---- I see this a lot on the forums and it's just not true. Someone has to buy it for them to make money off it. They don't get $20 when someone buys it and then another $20 when that someone else gets it off the CX. Ooops, just figured out that I was misunderstanding what you said. You're right, my bad. :D As for CREDD costing more than a sub, it should. A subscription to something says "I will give you money on a monthly basis. The default is that I will pay it every month, and I have to actively change that." Reliability in a customer is a valuable thing for running a business. CREDD purchases are a one-time deal with no reliability inherent to them at all. But if we accept your premise that they're more driven by CREDD than they are by subs, then I would argue to you actually do agree with me that the game is using a F2P business model, whether you would characterize it that way or not. You pay money or time to accrue in-game resources--that's the whole point of most F2P business models. | |} ---- You don't need the stats at all. When a bit after launch most of the servers were high, some of them having queue times, and only a few medium and now there are ONLY low ones, then either you want it or not there is a huge problem with the population. Now ofc if you want you can put your head in the sand too like many others do :) | |} ---- I don't want to give the impression Carbine did it to rip people off. It's actually a great idea they ripped off of EVE Online, and it works EXTREMELY well in that game. You've got people who don't want to pay a sub, but want to play the game. Fair enough, in most sub games, they'd be on the stoop crying. You've also got people with disposable income that don't want to grind plat to make their house pretty. In most sub games, those people stoop to dealing with RMTs and the like. The entire idea was to break the hold of the RMTs at the same time that they gave people who didn't want to pay a sub a way to play. This works in EVE because (last I played) you could count on about 500 million ISK for a PLEX. That's a decent chunk of change. And there are people who spend tons... TONNES of time in EVE and have ISK to burn. They released it here, and CREDD bottomed down to somewhere below 4 platinum. Carbine didn't anticipate that low of a price. RMTs could compete then (leading to a mass invasion of mining bots people didn't think they'd see) and people stocked up on CREDD for a year. Which probably made Carbine and NCSoft a lot of money, but it made their system a little wavy. We'll see where CREDD ends up, but it's a decent tool that allows more players to play and people to get the most common currency in the game. That's why I foresee Carbine, if they change RNG so you can buy tier gear, it's going to be with gems and not plat. Enough people buy CREDD for houses, mounts, and other gold sinks. So the game wasn't designed to sell anyone CREDD (I get by just fine with my sub). It's also a nice system to have around. But I don't think we deserve any more than CREDD bought players deserve. | |} ---- Nothing wrong with his statement. "Buy it" was simply misinterpreted. "... because even if someone doesn't buy it the exchange and use it from the CX, they've still made their money those who bought it from the website." In another words, if someone buys 10 Credd with cash, but did not sell it in the exchange, Carbine still made $200. | |} ---- My premise isn't that they're driven by CREDD; they don't see a difference. The people who are paying them to buy CREDD are also buying their subs, more than likely. Nobody is buying CREDD and applying it to their own account, they sell it for plat. But Carbine doesn't treat anyone differently because of that. If CREDD buyers leave the game, they no longer buy the CREDD people are selling and the currency becomes worthless. I just don't see a difference between the two, or a reason to treat us sub payers as if we deserve better by our payment method. We're all paid in from someone at some time. | |} ---- Yep, fixed. | |} ---- ---- Danke. I apologize for the confusion. | |} ---- The distinction I was trying to make wasn't between CREDD buyers and subs--as you noted, CREDD buyers ARE subscribers. The distinction is between a game where buying into it actually gets you a fun game (most sub-based games) and one that is intentionally made tedious to inspire you to spend (F2P games). The model these guys have is that this game is intentionally made tedious to inspire you to spend when you've ALREADY spent. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too. | |} ---- Actually, I'd argue the opposite, they just didn't have either. F2P games force you to spend money to get gear, but a lot of people don't get that much plat from a CREDD. Even now, I think buying a CREDD takes a few solid hours of farming and selling in one day, and it pays for a month. So you can't really get plat to buy into dungeons with CREDD, its still undervalued. However, Carbine used a Diablo-style stat system for gear with a WoW-style loot system. It means you've got quite a few times where you don't get anything good. So they don't have the long, drawn out, tiered gear grind of a sub game to keep people chasing the will o' the wisp, but they also don't have the pay-cash-or-grind-for-a-year mentality F2P games have that make them a lot of extra money. Sounds like they'll be altering the gearing to be more in line with other sub games, so that's good news. | |} ---- To be fair can you name a single MMO where this isn't the case? All MMO's have repetitive time sinks in some form or another. | |} ---- ---- But a lot of repetitive time sinks are less noticeable when you're making slow, constant progress as opposed to rolling the dice twice on every drop to get the gear you want with the stats you want. It's a subtle difference on player mentality; a lot of people would rather grind 50 tokens at a 50% drop rate than have a 1% drop rate on the thing they need itself. | |} ---- I foresee this in the future as well. | |} ---- ---- The problem with this argument is that it implies that the strategy is to make buying ONE CREDD worthwhile. You can get tons of plat with CREDD. You just can't do it with ONE CREDD. In the F2P world, this is known as whale hunting, and it does the same thing there that it's doing here. It convinces people who don't spend $500/month on a video game that their money would be more effectively spent elsewhere, so that in the end all that's left is the whales and the 24/7 players who provide their gear and game carries at an outrageous exchange rate. | |} ---- Again: You can't if too many players leave. This has already happened on several servers. It's just a bad model for milking whales. You want them to get invested longterm. 3 months isn't longterm. | |} ---- ---- I agree Vic, but at the same time, so what? We know what we are getting in MMO's; run content over and over to get gear / progression to conquer more difficult content. I am not sold on most of the gear complaints. even the worst stats on a piece are more than good enough for some one; and it isn't so much about stats folks wan't versus stats Min/Maxers claim to need. The hard truth and probably why so many are upset with the gear system; is that skill and gameplay is a lot more important in this game than other MMO's. You can't just target a dungeon boss and spam magic missile.. you have to PLAY the boss; dodge teles, keep telegraph uptime, and respond quickly to shifts in mechanics. Doing that well makes much more difference than a maxed epic piece versus a decent epic piece. | |} ---- Ah, here we go. Yes, the real reason people are leaving is that they just suck too much to be here. Ayep. *watches as the train goes flying off the rails* | |} ---- Reading a difficult thing for you? Point on the dollie where I said anything about people leaving because they suck... or where I said anything about people sucking, or leaving, at all.. Do you see it? Because anyone who reads certainly can't. I pointed out that we aren't ignorant to the MMO genre, and what it entails. I also noted most of the crying about gear comes from folks paying heed to the min/maxing crowd, rather than actual gameplay and mechanics. I never said anything about 'people sucking' or being 'not good enough'. | |} ---- Sure you have, but remember: They probably weren't using an analogy to the CREDD system (it's comparatively rare, as far as I know). This makes all the difference. If only 200 people play Farmville but spend $1000 a month on it, it's probably still profitable. These whales are also still happy, because they can directly pay their way to whatever they want in the game. There is no upper limit to the cash they can dump and to the benefits they can reap from this cash dumping. If only 200 people who buy CREDD and maybe 500 who farm platinum are left, no one can afford the CREDD. The system collapses and the whales will leave. Not because they don't want to spend $, but because they can't spend it. This is the difference between a system that conjures premium currency out of thin air and hard $ (like whatever Farmville style games use) and a system where you only get as much benefit from your $ as other players can provide with the sweat of their brow. | |} ---- Not following this argument at all. The CREDD is sold on an exchange, so the market sets the price point for it. The whales can afford the CREDD in real money, and the F2Pers can afford the CREDD easily--if anything, they can get it too cheaply because according to the people who are more "hardcore" than I will ever be, they only need to farm for a day or two to make the plat to obtain their free month. The rest of their time can be spent doing whatever they want. | |} ---- I thought they said that the high end of the server capacities, was something like... 16K players. Now, low could be 5K for all we know, but that doesn't mean 5k people are actually playing. I love this game to bits, and I am far from being a "white night" and all that, but really... have to stop kidding ourselves; people *are* leaving in droves, and this game, unfortunately, has very little staying power. | |} ---- Okay, yeah I goofed with the phrasing on the "afford" part. What I meant was that plat farmers in a small population cannot afford the platinum prices CREDD whales would require to get true p2w advantages. Let me use an example instead. CREDD prices are server based, so the numbers actually aren't completely unrealistic, considering some server populations at present. The 100 Whale CREDD buyers on the server each spend $200 on CREDD, netting them 10 tokens each. There are 100 players on the server that know how to make platinum efficiently. Right now, CREDD is at the most around 15 plat on very low pop servers. Each of the 100 farm players can thus get almost a year's subscription with just 150p (which they can farm in about a week). After this has happened for a few weeks, the market is dead on that server. Whales cannot spend more $ because farmers don't need more CREDD. And what have the whales gotten for their $? 150p (x whatever number of times farmers want to get a year's worth of subscription), which gets them a Strain hoverboard and an epic dye job. Or maybe a good gear set with runes and a PvP carry. It's simply not enough platinum. | |} ---- Reading is hard. I do my best, though. Still, you're right. All you said was that the thing people were really upset about with regards to gear was that this game is about _skill_ and not gear. One would have to add to that statement that the tedium and inaccessibility related to gear is a reason people give for leaving the game--which they do--and also accept your statement as correct--which I presumed that you do, although I may be wrong--before reaching the inevitable conclusion that the reason people leave the game isn't REALLY a gear problem, it's because they actually lack the skill to make any progress, and then mistakenly blame it on the gear. My apologies for drawing a conclusion that you didn't say from the starting point that you did say. | |} ---- It happens, no worries. As for the tedium, I agree with your point, but I really am surprised that it is the case. I wonder what people actually expected from an MMO? To not be like every other MMO? | |} ---- You are presuming that the farmers But the whales CAN spend more--they can buy CREDD even if the people they'd sell it to already have all that they need. And then what happens? The price of CREDD falls because the supply goes up. The ability to play for free comes within reach of people who don't farm as effectively, who then farm and buy CREDD. This doesn't hit a system collapse until one of two things happen: either the server runs out of people willing to play the game for free based on farming for CREDD, or the plat value of CREDD falls so low that the whales aren't willing to buy it any more. | |} ---- Except that's demonstrably not what happens on low pop servers. CREDD goes one way: Up. My point was even at the comparatively high price of 15p, it's just not enough to fuel p2w. If, if it fell to a whooping 1/3 and thus allowed three times as many players to get CREDD, we would just be at square one a few weeks later. Everyone playing on CREDD, no one wanting to give up platinum for it anymore. I'm actually speaking a bit from experience here, as I'm not a whale, but have put myself in a comparable position by stockpiling CREDD early. Do you know how hard it is to change it back to platinum at this point? And I'm on one of the more populated "low" servers. Just... no one wants it anymore. I'm hoping things will pick up a bit next week when the month ends, but this is just... not so great right now. | |} ---- I expect some tedium from a MMO, sure. I've played lots of them, and I know that's the deal. That's why I generally don't stampede to 50--doing so races me right past most of what the game offers. But the fact that all MMOs have some amount of grind and repetition to them is not the same thing as saying every MMO requires as much grind and repetition as this one does in order to make a comparable level of incremental progress. And I suspect that you were aware of this when you made the argument in the first place. | |} ---- I understand your sentiment, but respectfully disagree. Most MMO's I've played require more grind for equally incrimental progress (FFXI, EQ,UO,RO, etc). That said there are some I can think of that have less (e.g SWTOR). So I respect your opinion; but also I find the opposite with my experience. | |} ---- But...but...where are your stats? May we have a link? Have you seen any official announcement about this? Any official numbers? Anything at all? I think we don't want to stop kidding ourselves. Thats the only explanation i have about some ppl in these forums :) | |} ---- Each server (based on the number of accounts revealed by the forums) has to be able to hold a minimum of 22,000. so High is probably between 22-30,000 online at the same time. Where exactly Medium and low fall in the range is pure speculation; but it's probably something similar to 30k-20k = high | 20k-10k = mid | < 10k = low | |} ---- Hang on, the fluctuations due to supply and demand happen on top of the overall movements in the economy based on total gold supply. That gold supply was 0 a few months ago. I'm not surprised that the CREDD prices are increasing--the issue is whether they're increasing relative to the increase in gold people had to toss around. Well, yeah, the system does collapse if too many people find the content unacceptably tedious and unrewarding to even be willing to play it for free. It is unquestionably possible to set those bars too stringently to keep the game alive. | |} ---- And that's what my point was. In Farmville, this still wouldn't matter. The whales could still live happily ever after because they skip the tediousness with cash. Without any limits or concern for market fluctuations/ players' behavior. | |} ---- Then I suppose that your experience and mine are based on different games--and given the ones you listed, different years of operation as a competitive MMO. | |} ---- Lol, you calling me old ;P EQ2 and XI still have substantial player bases, as does RO. W* was intended to rekindle those types of games feel (like OG vanilla WoW) IIRC, so i like them as an example. SWTOR and XIV are intentionally catered to a non-hardcore audience. Not a bad thing, just different games for different people who like different gameplay / systems. | |} ---- Nah, suckers are born every minute. NCSoft still hasn't been paid yet. Server xfers are still $20 lol.. they're going to keep milking it. As they should! I would do the same if my empire was crumbling. | |} ---- I'm guessing you're being sarcastic...it's hard to tell on the forums, anymore. They did give the server capacity numbers, back at headstart, when people were bitching about the queue times. No, I'm not going to go look up the post for you. | |} ---- This made me LOL. :D | |} ---- ---- With that said, I don't think this has anythign to do with the combat mechanics except that the combat mechanics are difficult. In WoW, we could run dungeons for a whole day, just chain running the things, because you can zone out a bit. Can't really do that in this game, so I think the gearing system is understandably (and unintentionally) punitive at the endgame. Obviously, this wasn't a big issue through the rest of the game; you go through gear like candy at the lower levels. But considering how blisteringly difficult and concentration-heavy this game is in the endgame, chain-running dungeons on that level just isn't something most people enjoy. You burn out. And even if that isn't an issue for you or me, it's an issue for a lot of folks, and an understandable one at that. Nobody wants people quitting because they've spent three or four hours farming veteran endgame content and gotten literally nothing. Even if they'd moved halfway on some kind of token system for gear, they'd have made "progress". And even if that reduces the chances of striking the lotto and getting a perfect gear drop, I think that would be beneficial for the game. So no, it's not a BIG deal to me, but can I see it being a big deal for everyone else? Absolutely. And it certainly wouldn't break my heart if it changed. I don't find satisfaction in the game's gearing system, I find it in the combat. Since it's a huge issue for a lot of otherwise important players and doesn't nerf the actual content, I can only see an overhaul of that nature to be a win-win. Not that we even know for sure yet how or what they're overhauling. | |} ----